Founded | August 1997 |
---|---|
Founder | Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena [1] |
Type | Community |
Focus | Open source |
Products | GNOME, GTK, GLib, and others |
Method | Development and documentation |
Website | gnome |
GNOME Project is a community behind the GNOME desktop environment and the software platform upon which it is based. It consists of all the software developers, artists, writers, translators, other contributors, and active users of GNOME. It is no longer part of the GNU Project. [2] [3]
In August 2000, the GNOME Foundation was set up to deal with administrative tasks and press interest, and to act as a contact point for companies interested in developing GNOME software. While not directly involved in technical decisions, the Foundation does coordinate releases and decide which projects will be part of GNOME. Membership is open to anyone who has made a non-trivial contribution to the project. [4] Members of the Foundation elect a board of directors every November, and candidates for the positions must be members themselves.
The GNOME Project holds several community programs and events, usually tailored to local users and developers. The main gathering of GNOME contributors is the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference (GUADEC), an annual conference used to discuss the development and progress of GNOME. [5] The idea of GUADEC events is attributed to the GNOME developers' and users' Paris meeting of 1998. [6] An annual Asian conference called GNOME.Asia also exists. [7] GNOME also participated in the Desktop Summit, which is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities that was held in Europe in 2009 and 2011. [8]
Among the project's community programs is Outreachy, established with the goals of increasing women participation and improving the resources available to all newcomers for getting involved in GNOME. [9]
GNOME Project is involved in development of a range of notable software, including: [10]
GNOME 3:
The GNOME Project actively collaborates with other free software projects. Previous collaboration efforts were ordinarily organized on project-to-project basis. [11] To make the collaboration broader, the freedesktop.org project was founded.
The project focuses on: [12]
KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the Plasma Desktop, KDE Frameworks, and a range of cross-platform applications such as Amarok, digiKam, and Krita that are designed to run on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, Microsoft Windows, and Android.
The X Window System is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
GNUstep is a free software implementation of the Cocoa Objective-C frameworks, widget toolkit, and application development tools for Unix-like operating systems and Microsoft Windows. It is part of the GNU Project.
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.
freedesktop.org (fd.o) is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free-software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) and Wayland on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000. Some of the project's servers are hosted by Portland State University, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Google.
GUADEC, the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference, is an annual developer conference, whose prime topic is the development of the GNOME desktop environment and its underlying base software, such as GTK, GStreamer, etc.
openSUSE is a free and open source RPM-based Linux distribution developed by the openSUSE project.
Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Clutter is a discontinued GObject-based graphics library for creating hardware-accelerated user interfaces. Clutter is an OpenGL-based 'interactive canvas' library and does not contain any graphical control elements. It relies upon OpenGL (1.4+) or OpenGL ES for rendering,. It also supports media playback using GStreamer and 2D graphics rendering using Cairo.
GNOME 3 is the third major release of the GNOME desktop environment. A major departure from technologies implemented by its predecessors, GNOME 3 introduced a dramatically different user interface. It was the first GNOME release to utilize a unified graphical shell known as GNOME Shell. It also introduced support for the Wayland display protocol and added integration with other key technologies such as Flatpak during its development lifecycle.
Wayland is a communication protocol that specifies the communication between a display server and its clients, as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. A display server using the Wayland protocol is called a Wayland compositor, because it additionally performs the task of a compositing window manager.
GTK is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary software to use it. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the Wayland and X11 windowing systems.
GNOME, originally an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment, is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
GNOME Shell is the graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 3, which was released on April 6, 2011. It provides basic functions like launching applications, switching between windows and is also a widget engine. GNOME Shell replaced GNOME Panel and some ancillary components of GNOME 2.
Igalia is a private, worker-owned, employee-run cooperative model consultancy focused on open source software. Based in A Coruña, Galicia (Spain), Igalia is known for its contributions and commitments to both open-source and open standards. Igalia's primary focus is on open source solutions for a large set of hardware and software platforms centering on browsers, graphics, multimedia, compilers, device drivers, virtualization, embedded Linux, and device drivers.
MATE is a desktop environment composed of free and open-source software that runs on Linux, BSD, and illumos operating systems.
Mir is a computer display server and, recently, a Wayland compositor for the Linux operating system that is under development by Canonical Ltd. It was planned to replace the currently used X Window System for Ubuntu; however, the plan changed and Mutter was adopted as part of GNOME Shell.
Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM) is a display manager for the X11 and Wayland windowing systems. SDDM was written from scratch in C++11 and supports theming via QML.
GTK Scene Graph Kit (GSK) is the rendering and scene graph API for GTK introduced with version 3.90. GSK lies between the graphical control elements (widgets) and the rendering.
GNOME 1 is the first major release of the GNOME desktop environment. Its primary goal was to provide a consistent user-friendly environment in conjunction with the X Window System. It was also a modern and free and open source software alternative to older desktop environments such as the Common Desktop Environment (CDE), but also to the K Desktop Environment (KDE). Each desktop environment was built-upon then proprietary-licensed widget toolkits, whereas GNOME's goal from the onset, was to be freely-licensed, and utilize the GTK toolkit instead.